One rookie assistant + one demanding executive = flirting that is too hot to handle.

Have you ever wished for the perfect job? Me, too. So when I land a temporary gig with a worthwhile and exemplary startup, I'm determined to make it permanent. That my boss is the gorgeous, clever Elliot Sax is nothing I can't handle. We may steal glances at each other and straddle the line of playing it safe, but our partnership is too important for complications. Not to mention workplace hookups are against the rules.

But when our attraction flames hotter, our best efforts are put to the test. I never imagined having to fight my feelings for him on a daily basis and keeping my hands to myself is absolutely killing me.

Until I can't. Until we can't. And what's at stake becomes more than our jobs. What's at risk is our hearts.

I dived into Robin Bielman’s ‘Too Hard to Resist’ without having read the other books in this series, happy to say that this works perfectly as a standalone. And the pages do turn quickly, with the gradual upping of sexual tension until it eventually breaks.

A friends-to-lovers romance isn’t my favourite though the forbidden workplace one is one that I was eager to delve into. But ‘Too Hard to Resist’ is a hard one to write about, not because it wasn’t an easy read (it was) but because the to-and-fro-ing and the somewhat predictable plan that Elliot and Madison make to keep a distance from each other that didn’t work out in the end.

And round and round the game went as both parties vacillated between flirting and not wanting to cross that line, to the point that I got bored (when I should have been excited) by the time they finally fell into bed.

There also seemed to be a greater affinity with Madison that I felt, like I knew her feelings, hopes and plans more intimately than I knew Elliot, who in comparison, seemed to take a greater interest in Madison only when she became his assistant. His mostly lustful thoughts of her and nothing much else besides how good she was as his co-worker were what I got from him instead—that he wanted her physically wasn’t in any doubt, but I didn’t feel as though that extended to beyond the bedroom or the office as his assistant or that he was prepared to sacrifice anything for this hookup he wanted so badly.

The contrast between rather inexperienced heroine and the player hero was a little irksome nonetheless as Elliot made (dickish) moves that were clearly meant to distract her from dating other guys when I, liked Madison, couldn’t figure out his game beyond wanting her in bed as every chapter written in his POV has some kind of sentence that emphasises her hotness or involves body parts squishing together in a hookup. That there were occasional ex-fuck-buddies of his coming into the picture here and then didn’t bode all too well; neither did Madison’s inexperience that somehow translated into inexplicable naïveté and insecurity towards the end when the stakes never seemed equal between them.

I do like Bielman’s writing, but ‘Too Hard to Resist’ sadly didn’t quite work out too well for me as a result—the inequality of feelings, the way I felt more for one protagonist than the other were writ too large for me to look away from, despite the forbidden romance trope that I typically like.